301media.com | A mixed media blog by David Baker

What fascinates me most about the film City of Lakes isn’t it’s gorgeous photography or vibrant locations. It isn’t even the fact that it was filmed with Canon DSLRs, my latest gadget infatuation, though I must admit it’s stunning to think of people producing feature films with an inexpensive prosumer handheld camera. The most interesting thing isn’t even the fact that I recently c0-directed a film about a wedding.

What’s most interesting to me is the blend of fiction and reality. The producers of this film used a real wedding as backdrop, and they wove actors and a fictional story into the periphery of this real event. It’s reality programming, but done with grace, elegance and storytelling.

This is where documentary meets fiction, and I hope it lives up to the promise of a new genre. Even if it doesn’t, it’s a fascinating idea. The guerilla filmmaking possibilities are endless. Imagine assembling actors and filming a scene with Obama’s inauguration as a backdrop. Or how about mixing some current ongoing phenomenon, say some of these protesting Tea Party nincompoops, into a fictional, scripted film that uses actors.

I love the new possibilities created by technology. I suddenly have so many ideas for a blend of documentary and fiction. And what helps make it possible is an inexpensive, portable system of producing big-screen quality footage that DSLRs provide.  Can’t wait to see what’s next. I hope I can somehow be a part of it.

Reached 100 pages on my newest writing project, Homeland. It’s a feature script set during Japanese American internment during WWII. Took me 17 days to reach 100 pages, which I did as part of the Script Frenzy event. I’ve probably got another 40 to go, which I hope to knock out in the balance of April.

It’s amazing how many folks, a lot of them young, who write recreationally as part of this program. I suppose there are plenty of screenwriters who would shrug this sort of activity off as amateurish, but I find it enjoyable. Plus it never hurts to have a deadline.Writing can be painful. It stings to use both sides of your brain in concert, struggling with a blank screen or the banality of a cliche-ridden draft you’re cranking out at warp speed.

But then storytelling is inherent in us as a species. We do it around meals, beer, cocktails, business lunches, on the phone or in 140 characters of SMS. Might as well capture in in Courier in feature film format.

The vast majority of the 20,000 people signed up to write a script in April won’t finish. Most of the finished scripts won’t be very good, mine included–at least until another dozen drafts of the material are completed.

Some of us might get lucky. Maybe I’ll option another screenplay or produce all or part of this on my own. None of that really matters, though, in the short term. Right now, I just have to finish this draft, stealing an hour here and there.

A Country Wedding will be showing this Saturday, March 13 at the Da Vinci Film Festival in Corvallis. Looking forward to finally seeing our hard work on the big screen, and a party with the cast and crew afterwards.

We boxed up copies of the film for the cast and crew.

Sammy was cold when I found her this morning on the couch. There wasn’t shock or surprise…she’d been dying hard for the better part of a week. Mainly there was relief: I was thankful she was no longer suffering; I was grateful I didn’t have to watch her waste away any more; glad that I didn’t have to wrestle syringes of mushed cat food down her throat with the faint hope that this might somehow re-start her system.

In the end she died, and I took her out and buried her in the flower bed. We’ll plant a fern over her and find a concrete statue that resembles her in her prime, and we’ll remember an awesome goddamned cat.

Even people who hate cats loved Sammy. Partially it was that she acted like a dog: greeting you at the door, climbing all over you, desperate for affection, desperate to win your approval. She was cussed out not a few times when we tried to work and she’d be there calling for attention. She weathered the abuse of a growing child who treated her like a doll and carried her around the house once she grew too old to outrun her. When Bailey was an infant and we closed her in her room at night to cry herself to sleep because that’s what some stupid book told us to do, Sammy, who knew better, would sit outside the door with a look of pity concern until the crying stopped.

Within minutes of meeting her, even the most hardened cat hater and most macho dog lover would be absently petting Sammy as she snuggled into his lap. You couldn’t help yourself. She worked harder at melting hearts than any creature I’ve known. You open yourself up to ridicule, I suppose, writing a eulogy for a cat. Even a cat lover like Hemingway wouldn’t stoop to this. But I gave up being a serious writer a long time ago. Screw it, I’m going to eulogize.

Sammy sat on my lap while I wrote three thousand pages of drivel…two finished and unpublished novels, and two stillborn epics never completed despite amassing an ungodly number of pages. She outlived my desire to be a Great American Novelist. She spent many late hours purring patiently as I wrote a few screenplays that fared a little better than my novels, and as I burned oil until well past midnight launching armadas of marginally useful emails for what is colloquially referred to as a “real job.”

In the end, she never judged. She just wanted a warm hand to slick back her fine gray fur. She wanted to wedge her chin against your cheek and make a burbling noise not unlike a coffee percolator that would slowly unravel your frayed nerves and remind you that you aren’t alone in the world with your toils, and how the simple things, like the humble acknowledgment of the fact that other creatures exist and breathe and want nothing more than a scratch under the chin, can change your attitude. Sometimes it takes another species to remind us that we’re human.

Sammy had a good life. Nancy picked her out at a shelter fifteen years ago. She was scrawny, wearing her rib cage like a corset, blowing snot and twisting her bony, patchy body around our legs. For some reason, this little mongrel won Nancy’s heart even though she didn’t look like much to me. We spent a couple thousand bucks, which was a lot when you’re making $6.50 per hour on the night shift at Kinko’s, getting her healthy, and she spent the rest of her life showing us her gratitude.

Thanks, little gray buddy, for the gift of your friendship. I’m reaching out my hand now, and for the first time in fifteen years a grumbling, mewing, sleek little creature isn’t leaping out of the shadows to arch her back under my fingers. That’ll take some getting used to.

After my last post that warned against obsessing over technical details, here are a pair of short films that are both technically solid and have strong story elements.

The photography is stunning in both pieces. The first is shot with a newer DSLR, and the second, a previous generation SD camera.

These pieces are similar in their technical precision, but they’re quite different in the pacing of their editing.

Nocturne from Vincent Laforet on Vimeo.

SIMILO teaser from Macgregor on Vimeo.

I tallied up the hours I spent editing our first short film, A Country Wedding, and it’s somewhere up around 100. If you multiply that out by my hourly rate I used to charge when I did freelance web design and consulting, that would amount to $6,000. That’s more than three times our budget, and nearly as much as Robert Rodriguez spent making his crazy-good debut feature film.

But you don’t make short films for money. You do it to learn how movies are made, to have fun, to build a portfolio or maybe a combination of all three. I recently saw Rodriguez’s award-winning short film, Bedhead, for the first time. I’d just watched a rough cut of our short and was feeling pretty good about the technical quality and the beauty of many of the shots. But watching Bedhead made me realize that polish and technical quality are probably the least important elements of a short film. What is more important is the story and style.

You can see the evidence of clear brilliance in Bedhead. Sure it’s 16mm, black and white with overdubbed sound and a hand drawn title sequence. He edited that film on two VCRs. But none of this matters, because if you start watching this movie, the next ten minutes fly by and you’re a little sad when it’s over. To me, that’s the mark of a quality short film.

How does Rodriguez make you care about the characters? How does he pull you into the story and make the time pass so quickly? He does it through solid directing and creative camera work. The performances are natural. The editing style and shots are whimsical and fast-paced. You don’t even notice the technical details after a while.

It’s amazing to think what he would have been able to accomplish with Final Cut Pro and a Canon 7D. Or even a Flip camera. What kind of movie would Bedhead have been if he had all this gear 20 years ago?

Anyone interested in independent film has probably read Rodriguez’s book about breaking into the film business. And they know that he spent years making short films with the most crude equipment imaginable. But he still managed to make films that are as watchable today as when they were released nearly 20 years ago. And that’s made me realize that you can get seriously sidetracked worrying about the technical details of a film. It’s dangerous to spend about what camera to use or whether to shoot SD or HD, or to be thinking about what sort of color treatment you’re going to give your movie. It’s more important to focus on the story and style of your project, because that will ultimately determine whether or not it’s successful. Would your movie still be watchable if you were limited to the same equipment that Rodriguez had in making his first films?

Technical details are still important. With amazing filmmaking equipment available at reasonable prices, the bar is constantly being raised, and you need to proceed with care and attention to detail if you want your work to stand out. But I’d be willing to bet that Bedhead would still be a winner at film festivals today, even if it were stacked up against a slate of films shot on an HVX with adapters, edited in Final Cut Pro and color corrected with Magic Bullet.